Who could have imagined a month ago, when polls had Martha Coakley leading Scott Brown by more than 20 points, that a massive earthquake was in store not only in Haiti -- but also in Massachusetts?

Haiti's was a staggering blow to a country that has suffered vastly too much. Tuesday's Massachusetts quake caused no loss of life but it devastated the nation's ideological landscape.

One of just five Republicans in a 39-member state senate, Brown and his Republican colleagues could caucus in an elevator. Massachusetts voters break down as 51 percent independent, 37 percent Democrat, and a paltry 11 percent Republican. The state has not elected a Republican to the Senate for 31 years, nor a Republican to the House for 16. Fourteen months ago, Barack Obama carried the state by 26 points.

Now this -- a five-point Brown victory.

Bill Clinton campaigned for Coakley. So did Congress' full leftist monty -- with New York's Democratic Senator Charles Schumer dismissing Brown as a "far-right teabagger." Obama swooped in on Air Force One. He also inked a sweetheart health-care deal with the AFL-CIO, wherein the nation's 12 million unionists get a five-year bye on new taxes on expensive ("Cadillac") health insurance plans. The deal came just in time for the unions to flood Massachusetts with their phone-banks and swarms of organizers to save the Senate Democrats' 60-vote super-majority and, of course, ObamaCare.

WHAT happened?

The Democrats did a number of idiot things. Coakley said, "We need to get taxes up," favored a "war tax," backed repeal of the Bush tax cuts, signified for civil rights for terrorists, and in a state 50 percent Catholic said -- incredibly -- that because of the church's position on abortion, "Catholics probably shouldn't work in emergency rooms." She routinely linked Brown to -- of course -- "the failed policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney" and termed Brown an "enemy of rape victims."

But more than that, it was (1) health care -- with pre-election polls finding Massachusetts voters opposing Obama's and Pelosi's new health-care entitlement plan 48-40. (The same polls had only 30 percent giving a favorable rating to the Democratic Congress, and 55 percent rating it negatively.) ObamaCare has become a stew of payoffs and secret deals (e.g., the "Louisiana Purchase" of Sen. Mary Landrieu and the "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson).